Wearing scuffed brown shoes, wrinkled slacks and a polo shirt dotted with sailboats, Stanton City Councilmember Donald Torres looked like someone who had put on whatever clothes he found at the top of the laundry hamper.
That’s because he basically had.
He was one of more than 50,000 Orange County residents ordered to evacuate on Friday as authorities tried to cool down a rapidly heating tank holding a highly toxic chemical. Torres bounced around three locations over the next four days with his father, girlfriend, three parakeets, a dog and a turtle named Squirt while fielding calls from irate and scared residents.
He returned home to “a mess” Tuesday morning after officials lifted all evacuation orders. Hours later, he joined activists outside the Garden Grove City Council chambers to demand that the city deny GKN Aerospace an expansion permit and look into shutting down the 15.5-acre facility altogether.
But the first-term pol and lifelong Stanton resident, 26, had more on his mind than just the previous four days.
His hometown of about 40,000 residents — Orange County’s second-poorest and most ethnically diverse city — has long been a regional afterthought, the type of community that makes the news only when a tragedy happens. Local and national media didn’t even bother with that courtesy during the GKN crisis, focusing mostly on Garden Grove, which is four times more populous. Never mind that 85% of Stanton was evacuated. Or that most of the houses in the projected blast zone were a Shohei Ohtani homer away from GKN’s faltering tank. Or that the worst-case scenario toxic plume might have cut north through Stanton and passed right over Torres’ home.
During the crisis, no Stanton officials spoke at the daily news conferences with other local authorities. So when Torres took the lectern in Garden Grove, he wasn’t just there as an elected official. He demanded that the world give Stanton something it rarely gets:
Respect.
“As Stanton residents call me, I hear the hardship and a lack of adequate resources,” Torres read from a prepared text. “We have to rise to the occasion and act.”
Afterward, the councilmember shook hands with Carlos Perea, executive director of the nonprofit Harbor Institute and one of the news conference’s organizers.
“Thank you for including us,” said Torres, who works as a social emotional mentor and tutor at his alma mater, Western High School in Anaheim.
“Orange County always overlooks Latino areas, and politicians never take their concerns seriously,” Perea responded when I asked about Stanton, which is about 53% Latino and 27% Asian.
Nearby, Torres kept apologizing to people who asked for his business card — he didn’t have any on him.
“How many more disasters or near-disasters until working Latino families aren’t seen as an afterthought?” Perea added.
Torres has been in contact with the state legislators, Congress member and county supervisor who represent the city to see whether they can fund hotel and food vouchers for residents. He said he will push his City Council colleagues to ask insurance companies to help affected businesses. But he knows the road to recovery will be tough and unprecedented.
“In the pandemic, everyone at least was able to stay home,” Torres said after the news conference. “But right now, so many are displaced or were. It’s going to be harder for folks to come back to that.”
Stanton incorporated 70 years ago as part of O.C.’s post-World War II housing boom and thus shares the wide streets and tract housing of other central Orange County cities. But while others established national reputations — Anaheim for Disneyland and sports teams, Westminster and Garden Grove for their slices of Little Saigon — Stanton remained an outcast.
Neighboring towns looked down on its working-class residents and the beat-up motels along Beach Boulevard, which cleaves the city in half. Wagging tongues liked to point out that Stanton had first incorporated for a few years in the 1910s to stop Anaheim from making it into a sewer facility.
“We’ve come a long way from that ignominy,” joked Mayor David Shawver, who has lived in Stanton for 55 years and has served on the City Council since 1988. He evacuated his family while working from his home to help coordinate the city’s response to the chemical threat.
The mayor acknowledged that Stanton has long had to fight an unsavory reputation but argued that those days are past. Crime and homelessness are down, and a long-standing brickyard will soon make way for a mixed-use development.
“All my neighboring cities were so supportive of what our needs were,” he said, “and hopefully will continue to do so once we figure out what our residents need.”
Torres told me to meet him at Western and Cerritos avenues so we could check in on some of the businesses in his district. As I drove there, the well-kept strip malls of Garden Grove transitioned to scruffier ones on the Stanton side. The houses and apartments looked less polished. Stanton Central Park, the city’s biggest green space, was empty save for a trio of electric cars at charging stations.
“When I would tell people that I’m from Stanton, a lot of people ask, ‘Where is that?’” Torres told me in front of Carniceria El Novillo, which he has patronized his entire life. “We’ve felt that stereotype always, but it makes us have more pride. We double down on who we are.”
Torres greeted owner Adalberto Barrera Valencia, who has run the store for 18 years. Barrera Valencia and his family had to rent a place in Orange because their house was in the evacuation zone, and “hotels went from $180 to $400 within two days,” he told us in Spanish.
It was his first day back at the store. Only six customers had stopped in by the time Torres and I arrived around 1:30 p.m.
Barerra Valencia had to throw out a bunch of meat because it had rotted during the days the store was closed, he said. He gestured toward his wife, who stood behind a counter usually filled with premade food such as enchiladas and chiles relleno. “I told her, ‘Let’s close early today, no one’s coming,’ but she said, ‘We need to make what we can.’ We have a $1,800 electricity bill we have to pay this week.”
Torres told Barrera Valencia to note all of his losses to see what the city could do. Barrera Valencia, 59, smiled wearily. Just a few weeks earlier, he had complained to Torres about rising food prices.
“We just get hit here again and again,” he said.
The sentiment was the same at every business we visited. Panaderia El Cortez worker Esperanza Cancharí said the store had to throw out all of the pan dulce it had made fresh on Friday morning after it went stale during the evacuation. The nearby apartments where her customers mostly come from “were completely empty.” Hair Colab, where Torres gets his hair cut, didn’t close, but owner Carlos Gomez said there were “a lot of cancellations. People were too scared to come, and I don’t blame them.”
At Island Liquor, owner Dalbir Singh said his well-appointed store had been busy all morning. “People are tired of being in hotels — what else is there to do?” he said with a sad chuckle. He had to close all of Memorial Day weekend, typically one of their busiest stretches. But he had no problem with the evacuation.
“It’s better to be safe than sorry,” the 53-year-old Fullerton resident said.
We ended our tour at Cerritos Nutrition. Maria Ngo had spent most of the day tossing expired items and rotted produce from the small grocery store — casualties of the forced shutdown. She was fine, but her sister in Anaheim has friends staying with them for the foreseeable future.
“It hasn’t been crazy over there, but here is something else,” the 29-year-old said, fanning herself.
Torres wrote down his phone number and told Ngo to call him if she needed anything. Ngo didn’t realize he was a councilmember until then.
“Is it really close to here?” Ngo said, referring to the site of Stanton’s near-catastrophe. Torres replied that the problem plant was just down the street but that authorities had mostly neutralized the situation.
Then, Ngo asked what every Stanton resident will ask in the weeks and months to come, as authorities investigate what happened and how to prevent it from happening again:
“So are we going to be OK?”
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